There's no doubt the Apple emoji set wields great influence over the wider emoji landscape: partly due to early mass adoption (Gmail's emoji support was limited to the Gmail web interface, not a whole operating system) and partly due to the detailed designs which quickly became iconic and representative of "what an emoji is" to much of the general public.

💭 Interesting

'Geoffrey Rush's barrister Sue Chrysanthou just tendered an entry from www dot emojipedia dot com into evidence. She called it, with a straight face, "a reputable website"' - a tweet about this from Michael McGowan reporting from the Federal Court of Australia

Very cool UI to "build your own emoji". I was sent this more times than I can count. Fun to play for a few min, absolutely, though the shortcoming is that emojis are popular due to their ability to send inline with text, which this (obviously) cannot do.

The mechanics of simply updating a tally for "least used for x days" has turned a somewhat irrelevant fact (sort of - this doesn't track any new emoji) into an account that bubbles back in popularity with frequency.

I originally spoke to Angela Guzman - who helped create the first Apple Emoji set as an intern in 2008 - a few months ago. For the record, here's the two other designers involved in that original font.